Monthly Archives: April 2016

In Sunday’s Radio 4’s Something Understood programme,Mark Tullyasked if climate change offers an opportunity for us to improve our lives. The cartoonist Pettit lists some of the consequences of moving to green policies and technologies:

He believes that not only would this lead to consuming less and respecting nature more, but also to finding a deeper relationship with nature and each other – as Helena Norberg-Hodgestresses in her talks about global localisation (eg TedX here).

Selecting the industrial revolution as a starting point, as Christine Parkinsondoes in her forthcoming book, Three Generations Left? Mark discusses the prevailing economic wisdom of ever increasing growth, and ever increasing demand to feed that growth, with leading Indian economist Rajiv Kumar who referred to the consequences of all adopting the American way of life. In similar vein, the late Winin Pereira used to confound doubters by asking what would happen if every adult Indian acquired a car. Rajiv Kumar believes that economics can and must change to reduce our impact on the climate.

In 1998 I recorded Mark’s words in a broadcast which was part of the Independence Day celebrations: “It seems to me that India should have gone the way advocated by Gandhi – retaining and promoting rural self-sufficiency. 80% of its people live in rural areas – there are still 110 million peasant households”.

Mark acknowledges the benefits of human ingenuity which has led to so many technological advances and enhanced our lives. He considers how a move towards a new way of life might be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, while reminding us of a Native American Cree proverb that “only when the last tree has been cut down, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will man finally realise we can’t eat money”.

With Alex Bird and Philip Ross, he has now produced the Not Alone report published by Co-operatives UK, the Wales Co-operative Centre and the trade union’s Unity Trust Bank.

GEO in the USA put this blogout on Labour List and Shareable Weekly – and there has been strong interest in the report from MPs John McDonnell, Tom Watson and Stephen Kinnock.

The self-employed precariat do not enjoy employment rights and protections at work, or any of the implicit services associated with being an employee, such as payroll or workplace insurance – let alone pension or sick pay. In addition, their potential income is indirectly eroded by other costs such as agency fees. They face additional challenges related to being paid on time and the right to a contract. To compound all this, many of the self-employed are among the lowest-paid workers in the country.

The executive summary records that there are now more self-employed workers than at any time since modern records began. Some 4.6 million people, around 15% of the workforce, are now selfemployed and data from the Office for National Statistics show that two thirds of new jobs in the UK created in recent years are down to self-employment.

Current projections are that by 2018 the number of people who are self-employed will outnumber those working in the public sector. This report focuses on the needs of people in self-employment who face low income and social and economic insecurity – the ‘self-employed precariat’.

Around four out of five people in self-employment (83%) are sole traders with no employees. The selfemployed precariat is reflective of complex and diverse patterns of atypical work that is growing, ranging from casual working to temps, agency staff, own account workers and Uber drivers.

There are examples of freelancers coming together to form co-operatives for shared services, in some cases with support from entrepreneurial trade unions who see the opportunity to support members who are self-employed, not just those who are employed:

In Swindon, 50 music teachers have come together to form a coop to market their services to schools, with support from the Musicians Union

In London, interpreters came together in November 2012 in a co-op RICOL after changes in their terms and conditions when the firm Capita took on the contract to provide interpretation services in judicial courts.

In Wales, the Oren Actors Management Co-op allows actors between roles to work as agents for other co-op member actors, marketing their services.

The best shared service co-operatives offer back-office support, debt management, contract advice, access to finance, sickness insurance, the shared use of equipment and access to workspace. Some key services, such as mutual guarantee societies, which help freelancers to leverage low-cost loan funds from banks, have a proven track record in 20 EU countries, but face unintended regulatory barriers in the UK.

The report calls for the cousins of the labour movement – co-operatives, trade unions and mutual organisations – to come together and form cohesive institutions to unite the self-employed precariat in ‘solidarity economy’ partnerships.